The General Level Scaling / Difficulty Thread (not POTD)

[pstone]

Greetings, i wonder whether i did something wrong in my level scaling options.

 

I set it to "All" AND "Only scale upwards". I expected this to mean enemies will be adjusted if and only if they are lower level. However, all my quests have no skull indicators (for above my level) -> does anybody know how exactly this works ? Difficultiy indicators option is set to "On"

Edited May 10, 2018 by pstone

[EzekielMoerdyk]

It is supposed to work the way you suppose. It worked fine in the beta. Im not far enough into the game to have encountered areas above my level, but maybe, if you want to test, you can sail to the far edges of the world and see if you can find high-level content?

[robovoid_dev]

My run is on POTD + all (only up)

I think it works as intended, cuz I saw some skulls on the map

However, as you mentioned, the journal might be bugged. There are 0 skulls in my journal. So I am either extremely lucky (0 high level quest, which is less likely) or there are some problems with the quest journal.

[CAlmond]

I have the same level scaling options. Seems to work fine for me in terms of the actual mob difficulty. I haven't seen any skulls on my journal, but I'm also still early in the game and haven't seen that many quests/tasks yet

[pstone]

Ok i'll hope i find some higher level quests. So far, there was no indicator at all (not even a single grey skull).  But as long as it works as intendet its fine i guess

Edited May 10, 2018 by pstone

[BigFatPanda]

I've set level scaling for main story only, just arrived in nekataka, still haven't seen any enemies or journal entries with skulls either.

 

 

[Vastus]

I have the same issue, difficulty indicator is turned on, but I don't see skulls anywhere and I'm sure I should have. I ran into an island encounter with no skulls thinking it was my level, only to have my entire backline be oneshot by Storm of Holy Fire by one of the casters. That caster wasn't even the named enemy, nor was he the only caster. And I was level 5. I highly doubt an encounter with casters possessing PL7 abilities (around level 13) is supposed to be on level for a level 5 party.

[OlleDenStore]

Same here! I made a quick post in the bug report forum in the hopes that someone will take a look at this. I'm playing on POTD, but if any of you are playing another difficulty please comment on that.

[r44]

Hello everyone,

 

so i chose the veteran difficulty and lvl scaling is set to all, i heard about potd being relatively easy but i wanted to be able to change the difficulty midgame, just in case... Now i found out that i cannot change the level scaling midgame ! Am i just blind?

 

Why is the game not warning me beforehand? I still want to play on veteran but i want to be able to turn off lvl scaling.

 

Is there an option? Pls help :/

[BigFatPanda]

I'm playing on veteran.

[Karkarov]

My run is on POTD + all (only up)

I think it works as intended, cuz I saw some skulls on the map

However, as you mentioned, the journal might be bugged. There are 0 skulls in my journal. So I am either extremely lucky (0 high level quest, which is less likely) or there are some problems with the quest journal.

Nah it doesn't work right, last night I watched some early game streams and companion quests had skulls on them.  In my game (scaling on, up only), the companion quests have no skulls even though I am only around level 5 and the streamers I saw were level 3, and had 3 skulls.

 

Also I have run into fights clearly beyond my abilities (like three eotens at one time, who could one shot Aloth on a non crit and 2-3 hit Eder) and the area had no skulls associated with it.

Edited May 10, 2018 by Karkarov

[Kinthalis]

Same here. It seems it's not the difficulty setting (I'm on PoTD) but the scaling option that seems ot turn off the skulls. Sucks because on PoTD and with eveyrthing scaling up it's really important to know when you're going to tak eon something way beyond you.

[virgi26]

is it possible to turn off these skulls completely? I don't really want to know the difficulty of upcoming fights

[mrmonocle]

confirm the bug, had to restart because of it.

[Wormerine]

is it possible to turn off these skulls completely? I don't really want to know the difficulty of upcoming fights

Yes, once you start the game go to difficulty options and you can disable it.

[whiskiz]

My run is on POTD + all (only up)

I think it works as intended, cuz I saw some skulls on the map

However, as you mentioned, the journal might be bugged. There are 0 skulls in my journal. So I am either extremely lucky (0 high level quest, which is less likely) or there are some problems with the quest journal.

 

You realize PotD hasn't been balanced yet, right?

 

Which is why i'm personally waiting to even get the game, eagerly, but still.

 

https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/97171-josh-says-path-of-the-damned-difficulty-will-be-too-easy-on-launch-because-he-didnt-have-time-to-tune-it/

[syphonhail]

In PoE 1  if you changed the difficulty/scaling the change only worked on new areas you haven't been to before. So maybe it works the same? 

I know for sure the Companion quests for Xoti and Ereder show up as Red 3 Skulls with scaling turned off.

Edited May 10, 2018 by syphonhail

[Shepard]

I did NO for scaling and I have skulls on the companion quests, they were red, now after I leveled some, they are white.

[mbellis111]

If anyone knows a console command, or file that can be edited to fix this I would also appreciate it. I could have sworn I chose All Content, Scale Up only but when I checked again it says it is is None.

[mbellis111]

r44 - I was playing on Veteran & change difficulty to Casual, then back to Veteran and level scaling was disabled. I believe this is a bug, but perhaps you can take advantage of it to turn level scaling off mid game

[Amalith]

I'm having the same problem. I just went to start a new game and look, what happened with me is I set the level scaling on then changed to a different difficulty while in the menu. It resets the selection to none. Not really a bug from the look of it but a rather small oversight. But I would really like to be able to enable it mid game, I'm getting a bit over leveled but I really don't want to start a new game if I don't have to.

 

My worry is that it's something that needs to run from the start, like changing the challenge mode of Divinity 2 - it loads the game from the beginning with it in place and can't be changed later. But I looked at the difficulty options closely and it doesn't mention that it can't be changed once the game begins like the expert mode or path of the damned (the highest difficultly.)

[aweigh0101]

You can change the Level Scaling options via the game's registry entry inside HKEY_USERS > Software > Obsidian Entertainment:

1. Press Windows Key + R at the same time to open a Run Box and then type regedit.exe and press Enter/Return key.
2. Inside the regedit application press Control + F at the same time and type LEVEL_SCALE and press Enter/Return key.
3. Keep pressing F3 to cycle thru results until you arrive at the game's entry:



4. Change the numerical value in the corresponding Level Scaling entries to a number ranging 0 - 2, each corresponding to its setting in-game beginning from Disabled down to All. I haven't checked specifically which number toggles which value in-game so you'll have to change it and then check for yourself what the game is registering.

You can Control + F and search for any of the registry entries you see in that picture, it doesn't have to be LEVEL_SCALE; anything that will get you there.

EDIT: I'm not sure how the game applies scaling, and it's possible that it will only scale up/down NEWLY DISCOVERED AREAS, and that already spawned objects/creatures will retain whatever Level they were spawned with before you changed the option. I think it should be assumed that the game will only scale content that you haven't explored yet.

Edited May 11, 2018 by aweigh0101

[XANi]

Are you sure that works ? It seems to me that registry values would only change defaults, and difficulty/scaling options are per-save

[Amalith]

4. Change the numerical value in the corresponding Level Scaling entries to a number ranging 0 - 2, each corresponding to its setting in-game beginning from Disabled down to All. I haven't checked specifically which number toggles which value in-game so you'll have to change it and then check for yourself what the game is registering.

 

Do you mean load a game, go to the difficulty menu and look? Because I'm not seeing any change on the greyed out scaling section. Either way, I'll keep playing and see what happens.

[RevBlue]

So I'm only about a 2-3 of hours into the game(the ruins you first get sent to from Maje) and so far i'm already noticing signs that it looks like maybe the difficulty isn't enough for me?

 

I'm playing on Veteran, because i was worried POTD would be too difficult, i like a challenge but i don't want to redo every fight 5 times.

On Tyranny i played hard mode and about half way through the game every fight became a breeze, which was a bit of a bummer even though the game itself was still amazing and combat was fun.

 

Now i heard POTD is unbalanced currently, but is it like a weird balancing issue where its even easier than Veteran? Would level scaling be the way to go? How does that affect the difficulty exactly?